Tuesday, February 21, 2012

A Deep Dive Inside EPA Regulation: "Tangled up in green tape"

From the Economist:

The EPA, Congress, activists, the courts and power
companies themselves all share the blame for the chaotic nature of
environmental regulation in America

PITY the engineers responsible for keeping America’s coal-fired power
plants up to standard. Late last year a court halted the adoption of
new regulations on interstate air pollution that would have affected
lots of them—just two days before they were due to go into force. The
suspended regulations, in turn, were themselves a replacement for an
earlier set of rules which had been thrown out by the courts in 2008.
The older lot have now been temporarily reinstated, while the court
hears various challenges to the new ones. What the outcome will be is
anyone’s guess.

Similar chaos surrounds another set of rules, these ones governing
ozone, which will also affect lots of power plants. In 2010 the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed tightening restrictions
on ozone—a surprise in itself, since the rules were not due for review
until 2013. Late last year the White House overruled the EPA, and junked
the new rules. Since the previous set, dating to 2008, had never been
implemented, a standard first adopted in 1997 still applies. But
environmentalists have sued to put a fiercer one into force. Whatever
happens, the Clean Air Act obliges the EPA to reopen the whole subject
again next year.

Last year the EPA also issued rules on mercury and soot from power
plants. In theory that marked the culmination of a decades-long,
on-again-off-again process first initiated by amendments to the Clean
Air Act in 1990—although further lawsuits seem inevitable. Also in the
pipeline are restrictions on emissions of greenhouse gases, new rules
regarding cooling water and the possible declaration of coal ash as
hazardous waste, from which a stream of new requirements would flow.

Confused? So are the power generators. Conforming to these rules
often involves installing new kit or changing the way plants are run,
and on occasion shutting them down altogether. That is expensive,
utilities complain. The EPA itself estimates that meeting the new
mercury standards will cost businesses $10 billion a year. Electricity
prices, it reckons, will initially rise by 3% a year as a result. It
puts the cost of the interstate air pollution rule at $2.4 billion a
year, and of the ozone rule (if it is ever implemented) at $20 billion a
year at least. Industry groups, naturally, have far higher estimates of
the costs....MORE